This week, educators from all over the world have been coming together to share research, expertise and classroom practice at the World Education Summit (WES).

While thousands of educators joined in the discussions and debates, we know that many won’t have had the time to watch everything, alongside their teaching responsibilities.

Here, you can catch up with some of the key teaching and learning talking points from the week.

1. Why we need to forget achievement, and focus on progress 

Professor John Hattie is worried. 

Speaking at the WES this week, the renowned author of Visible Learning said he is concerned that schools are so obsessed with achievement, they forget that their job is to help students make progress. 

“I’m terrified to use the words ‘add value’, given what happened in England with that as a measure a few years ago, but it is adding value - it is that notion that every student, no matter where they start, deserves at least a year’s growth for a year’s input,” he said.

Key to this, he said, is to better understand what it means to develop a learner. Teachers have tens of thousands of measures of achievement, but Hattie asked: how many measures of learning are there? Here, he said, engagement is critical. 

“How do you know kids are engaged? The common answer is by doing the work,” he said. “Well, sadly, in a lot of doing, sometimes there’s not much learning and one of our mistakes is seeing engagement in terms of just participating. It requires much more attention than that; it requires teaching the kids to drive and strive. It’s to teach them not to avoid, disrupt or withdraw.”

Hattie went on to discuss his learning survey, which asked 29,000 students from 87 schools 39 questions about their learning. It’s due to be published in May. 

2. Desirable difficulties: why they matter so much for learning

Professor Robert Bjork is clear about what a teacher’s goal should be. For him, it’s about creating learning that is durable, so that skills and knowledge remain accessible. 

Bjork is renowned for his research on education and memory, and this week, at the WES, he spoke about the four “desirable difficulties” with which this kind of learning can be fostered in the classroom. 

Desirable difficulties, he explained, are processes of learning that students come up against, which, when engaged with successfully, support learning, comprehension and remembering.  

“They become undesirable difficulties when learners are not equipped to respond to them successfully,” he explained. This is tough, because “desirable difficulties are still difficulties, and doing anything that might impair one’s performance during learning is not very appealing”. 

Ensuring that students can persevere with these difficulties, though, is crucial. So what are these four desirable difficulties?

1. Varying the conditions of learning, rather than keeping them constant and predictable. 
    
2. Distributing or spacing learning, rather than masking or blocking, study or practice sessions.
    
3. Using tests rather than presentations.
    
4. Providing contextual interference during learning: interleaving rather than blocking the study of knowledge or skills.

3. The problem with copying ‘best practice’

“Imagine a primary school that, on the face of it, seems to have improved its reading test scores, and this is something that you want to do at your own school,” said Becky Allen, co-founder and chief analyst at Teacher Tapp.

Perhaps, Allen suggested, speaking at the WES, you might decide to contact that school to find out the secrets of its success.

“The headteacher [at the school] agrees that reading is vastly better taught now than before,” she said. “They tell you this is thanks to the implementation of the Lightbulb reading programme, and suggest that you can purchase it, too.”

The question is, will purchasing that scheme actually have the desired results? Will simply copying what this school has done be enough to improve reading at your own school?

That is far from certain, Allen said, because lifting an example of good practice wholesale from one school to another will only be successful as long as several conditions are met. 

Allen went on to discuss those conditions, and how leaders can approach school improvement. You can read her comments in detail here. 

4. How can we improve our assessment system?

“There’s no such thing as a perfect assessment system.”

That’s what Professor Dylan Wiliam told teachers and leaders at the WES this week. A statement like that from him, an educational figure well-respected for his work on education assessment, really sticks.

According to Wiliam, when it comes to assessment reform, leaders and teachers need to ask themselves: what will be better if we make these changes? And what will be worse? 

“The thing that I’ve learned in 30 years of thinking about assessment is that the constraints are real and pretty ineradicable,” he said. “People actually reject things, they don’t like them, and they think that the world can be other than it is. But the reality is that those changes are very difficult, and they usually make things worse.”

For example, he said, there are issues with performance assessments, progress measures and diagnostic assessment. The key to effective assessment, then, is to reduce reliability on one single approach.

“We can’t rely on the evidence we generate in a short period of time in the summer as being a good guide to what that student is capable of,” Wiliam said. “We have to find smart ways of combining teacher assessments with standardised assessments in a way that actually brings the best of both worlds together.” 

5. Why the education system prevents students from creating ‘beautiful work’

With a busy curriculum and the demands of assessment, teachers are left with little time to delve deep into topics, and students are given little chance to work on detailed projects.

That’s the view of Professor Ron Berger, education author and Harvard lecturer, who sees many students “on a treadmill of test preparation” who rarely get the opportunity to produce what he calls “beautiful work”.   

For Berger, this is a fundamental flaw in the way education is structured. “When a student is finished with school and moves into adult life, she will be judged not by her ability to perform a test of basic skills,” claimed Berger, “but the quality of her work and her character.”   

Berger argued that the creation of detailed projects and the acquisition of valuable skills and knowledge are not mutually exclusive, and he doesn’t think there needs to be a trade-off when it comes to performance in assessment.  

6. Students ‘should have internet access in exams’

Students should be given access to the internet in exams if we want to move our education system into the modern era, according to Sugata Mitra, professor emeritus at NIIT University Rajasthan.

Professor Mitra claims that the old model of exams, which he says primarily tests memory recall, is out of date because the internet means that we can access all information, all the time.

“By examination, we generally understand students sitting in rows and columns, answering questions on paper [that] relies a great deal on memory,” he said. ”[But] the situation has changed because of the internet. It is possible now to have all reference materials and a lot more available from the internet at a moment’s notice.”

In his opinion, then, we should give students access to the internet in exams. However, he acknowledged that, for the current exam system, this would mean students would likely get every answer right. But the flip side to that, he said, is being able to ask more complicated questions in exams that properly test students’ capabilities.

“If we allow the internet during examinations…it will change the kind of questions that we ask, to questions where the answers are not obvious and perhaps not even available,” he said. Read his comments in detail here.

7. The power of multiple-choice questions

Teachers need to harness the power of “competitive multiple-choice questions” and “competitive true-false” statement questions to boost student learning, according to Elizabeth Bjork, professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a world-leading expert on retrieval practice.

“We’ve shown that giving students a practice test using what we’ve come to call competitive multiple-choice questions - that is, a question on which all of the provided choices are competitive or plausible answers - can be just as beneficial to the student’s ability to perform well on a later exam,” she said. 

She explained that not only does this boost learning on what the right answer is but it also helps to improve “students’ ability to answer questions about one of the formerly incorrect alternatives”.

The research paper she co-authored on this with Jeri Little, an assistant professor in the psychology department at California State University, details how this approach benefited students who sat tests on the solar system. You can read more about it here. 

8. Is spatial learning schools’ missing metric?

Spatial ability is one of the most under-assessed skillsets in education, despite it being an accurate predictor of academic success, say experts - so what is it and how can schools better assess it?

According to Joni Lakin, associate professor at the University of Alabama, spatial skills can be defined as “the ability to imagine, to remember or to transform visual information”. 

Speaking during a panel discussion at the WES, Lakin explained that these skills are more important than we might think. They are used not only in school, in subjects like mathematics, but also in countless real-world scenarios.

“Are you good at making sure all the suitcases fit in the car, or putting together Ikea furniture? Those are spatial reasoning skills in real life,” said Lakin.

There is also good evidence that spatial ability plays a role in academic attainment. Speaking during the same discussion, Jonathan Wai, assistant professor of education policy and psychology at the University of Arkansas, pointed out that everyone has a natural level of spatial ability, which can be developed through training and support.

“We can think of it as being like athletic talent,” added Lakin. “You can be born with athletic talent, but if you never play a sport, you never get anywhere.”

Currently, however, there is not enough recognition of the importance of spatial skills or understanding about how to help pupils to develop them, suggested Emily Farran, professor of cognitive development, at the University of Surrey, who was also taking part in the debate.

The lack of emphasis placed on these skills in the national curriculum has “repercussions” for teachers “in terms of their confidence in knowing what spatial ability is” and “how to integrate it” into their teaching, she said.

As a result, children struggling with spatial reasoning skills may not be identified. This means that we “miss an entire dimension of capacity that could be developed further, and has been shown to be useful in a lot of different education and occupational settings”, said Wai.